Editorial to Issue 8
In this short editorial, we look back at the last two years of the Language Scholar to celebrate its growth and development.
Building on the strong foundations created by the first editorial team, we have published six issues from 2018 to 2020 (Issue 3-8). These have included three special issues which have focused respectively on content-based teaching; Arabic teaching and Study Abroad, each acting as conference proceedings for events that have been run or organised by colleagues from Leeds. The Journal has also strengthened its focus on language teaching; we have redeveloped our aims, the submissions categories and guidelines and collaborated on a manifesto that outlines the approach to scholarship that underpins the ethos of the Journal.
The Journal continues to focus on providing supportive and developmental feedback to authors who are new to writing for Journals and on supporting and encouraging submissions that break genre norms for academic communication.
This issue exemplifies some of this approach, with a Scholarbit from Siriol Lewis that looks at the use of emoticons for feedback – something that following the sudden shift to online teaching in 2020, many teachers are beginning to see the value of; and a paper that takes the form of a written conversation between colleagues – Marc Jones and Jon Steven – as they reflect on how they develop their own classroom teaching materials. Neil Allison’s paper combines creative methodologies with sound theoretical frameworks as he considers subject specific reading strategies for English for Academic Purposes through an Exploratory Practice lens. Hira Hanif has written a thorough and comprehensive literature review on the role and use of L1 (first language) in an English language classroom. Finally, Natalia Fedorova has reviewed a one-day event held at the University of Leeds that focused on different understandings of criticality in Higher Education.
The next issue will have a new co-editor, Martin Ward, who we wish to warmly welcome to our team. After this publication, Kazuki Morimoto, one of the Co-Editors, is leaving the Journal in excellent shape and we look forward to seeing the direction Martin will take it in. We hope to continue to develop our journal as a flexible multimodal platform where both language researchers and practitioners can share their findings and reflections.